Wi-Fi Mini Honeypot

Do you have an old, unused wireless router collecting
dust? Have some fun and make a Wi-Fi honeypot with it!

Recently, I've been playing with some new wireless gear. It's nothing special: 200mW
Atheros-based transceiver and 18dBi yagi antenna. I'm living in an
apartment in a city of about 640,000 people. I've pointed the antenna to
a window and passively received about 30 wireless ESSIDs, three of which
were unsecured (open) and six secured with WEP (easily crackable). I
haven't connected to any of them, of course, but that gave me some ideas.

What if I deployed a wireless access point deliberately open? Some people
eventually will connect and try to use it for Internet access—some might be
malicious, and
some might think that it's a hotspot. And, what if I deployed a similar
access point, but secured with easily crackable WEP this time? Well, in my
humble opinion, it's not possible to unconsciously crack WEP. If somebody
that I don't know connects to this AP, I've just been attacked. All I need
to do is to monitor.

That's exactly a wireless honeypot: fake access point, deliberately
unsecured or poorly secured and monitored, so you can get as much
information about attackers as you want. Such honeypots are especially
useful in large networks as early threat indicators, but you
also can play with them on your home network, just for fun and research.

You can build a wireless honeypot with old hardware, some spare time and,
of course, a Linux-based solution. OpenWrt and
DD-WRT
are the two most popular Linux-based firmware projects for routers. I
use them and some old spare routers in this article to show you how to build three kinds of honeypots:
a very basic one that logs only information about packets sent by users into
its memory, a little more sophisticated one with USB storage that logs a
few more details about malicious clients to the storage, and finally,
a solution that redirects HTTP traffic through a proxy that not
only can log, but also interfere with communication.

Basic Honeypot with DD-WRT

Building a very basic wireless honeypot shouldn't take you more than an
hour or two. Just grab your old router and pick up the firmware. Be sure
to look at supported routers for both DD-WRT and OpenWrt. In my case, it
came up that the router is supported only by DD-WRT, as it has 32MB of RAM
and 4MB of Flash memory. OpenWrt's hardware requirements are a little bigger.

Next, flash your router (that's the risky part). Basically, you need to
download the firmware for your machine and upload it to the memory. On
some routers, it's as easy as clicking a button on the Web interface. On
others, you have to connect through a serial cable, for example. Remember,
this step can be dangerous. Make a backup first and be sure to
read the instructions carefully on the DD-WRT/OpenWrt sites.

After successfully flashing your router, you should see an enhanced (as
compared to the original one) Web interface. Now, set up SSH access and
wireless network parameters. If you don't know how, you can find detailed
instructions on the DD-WRT home page. As it is going to be a honeypot,
I would suggest WEP, which should attract potential attackers. At the
same time, it won't be so vulnerable to false positives—people with
devices automatically connecting to an open network.

If you can log in as root and see the prompt, you're ready for the next
step: enabling system logging. You can do this using the Web interface:
Services→Services→System Log and Security→Log Enable (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Enabling System Logging

You also can set a few ESSIDs instead of just one: Wireless→Basic
Settings→Virtual Interfaces. After that, your honeypot will be seen
as a few networks—at least at first glance. This increases the
probability of attacks, especially when there are many other networks
in your neighborhood.

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